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Facebook is addressing some of the privacy questions surrounding its new Facebook Home service as of Monday morning. A post on its corporate blog addresses the pervasiveness and data use of Home, and while Facebook reassures users that it’s easily customizable and similar in many ways to the Facebook Android app, the presence of the post suggests users may want to be more cautious about how they interact with Facebook Home.

GigaOm’s Om Malik raised some questions about how Facebook Home would allow Facebook to penetrate further into users' smartphones and collect yet more data on their usage habits, including what apps they launch from within Home’s launcher. Malik highlighted in particular the phone’s access to location information, and guessed that it would be much easier for Facebook to figure out, for instance, where a person lives based on their Home usage (location logs for the hours between 10pm and 6am).

Facebook writes in its blog post that “Home collects information when you interact with the service” and that it “doesn’t use location in any way that’s different from the Facebook app you already have on your Android phone.” The second item seems like it might placate those worried about privacy. But taken together with the first, those two items indicate that while Home may not use location data any differently, it certainly has more opportunities to collect it.

The Facebook Android app and Home may perform the same types of data collection, but the app’s only opportunity to collect data is when the user navigates to and opens it. Since Home replaces the lock screen, it could scoop location information and anything else from the second a user turns on his or her phone.

Facebook does note that, like the app, location services can be turned off for Home. Users can also use Home without the lock screen cover feed or uninstall it completely, even on phones that come with it preinstalled.

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Casey Johnston
Casey Johnston is the former Culture Editor at Ars Technica, and now does the occasional freelance story. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Applied Physics. Twitter@caseyjohnston